


All the Stars Accounted For

by WanderingTheRailroads



Category: Missing Stars (Video Game)
Genre: Domestic Fluff, Drabble, F/M, Post-Canon, Pregnancy, Stargazing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-11
Updated: 2020-10-11
Packaged: 2021-03-08 00:42:10
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,024
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26946889
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WanderingTheRailroads/pseuds/WanderingTheRailroads
Summary: Erik comes home from work to find the house dark. Off he goes to search for Isolda.
Relationships: erik wilhelm x isolda gaillard
Kudos: 5





	All the Stars Accounted For

**Author's Note:**

> It's a Missing Stars fanfic for Erik/Isolda :D

Evening, after another long day of work, and the highway is slathered in a myriad of colours that seem to blend and blur together like egg yolk spilling from cracked car headlight shells. Behind the driver’s seat of his beat-up old Nissan, Erik keeps his hands on the wheel and eyes on the road. The turnoff’s just up ahead; miss it, and you’ll spend twenty minutes detouring through the Viennese countryside. No chances will be taken on his terrible sense of direction.

A driver overtakes him, honking loudly. There: the sign with its large white arrow looms ahead. Erik flips his ‘left turn’ signal and pulls away round a bend. He breathes a sigh of relief. Out here, amidst the fields and trees, there are fewer cars. The sky is a coal slate, decorated with points of light twinkling far away.

 _Right now_ , Erik muses as he continues driving down the dark, tree-lined road, _Isolda’s probably watching the same stars._ Or maybe the stars are watching her. Maybe they’re one and the same, a celestial avatar. Isolda certainly seems that way to him sometimes; the sensations of this mortal world are too crude, too raw, overwhelming for an ethereal beauty formed of starlight and space dust.

He smiles, shaking his head to clear that juvenile fantasy. _Of course not_. His wife is only human, albeit with a few more struggles than some others. He learned that a long time ago. So lost in musing is he that he almost doesn’t notices the stray raccoon illuminated by his car headlights. Barely swerving to avoid it, Erik makes the poor thing scamper off into the bushes in shock.

He pulls into the driveway twenty minutes later, arriving to a darkened house in the Viennese countryside.

 _Strange_ , it’s only nine, Isolda can’t be sleeping yet. Switching the light on, Erik dumps his laptop bag on the living room sofa and peers round. A half-empty cup of tea sits on the coffee table, but there’s no sign of Isolda.

“Dear? Where are you?” Erik calls out. No reply. He calls again and still nothing.

A shard of ice lodges in his gut. She’s seven months pregnant, if anything were to happen to her…

His leg is going numb.

No. No. No.

Erik inhales, exhales.

Calm down.

The sky is unusually clear tonight. Isolda’s probably stargazing again, which means she must be _up there_.

Sighing, Erik rubs his aching leg and makes for the stairs. Up he goes. On the second-floor landing he pauses, peering into their bedroom to check. Not there either. Erik proceeds upwards to the attic, where a doorway set into the wall leads to an outdoor balcony. It’s slightly ajar. He peeks through the gap.

Isolda, in a grey maternity gown with her hair tied back, sits cross-legged beneath the open sky with her eye to a telescope. Now and then, she strokes the huge swell of her belly while pointing out the constellations to her unborn son. She smiles, radiant.

 _I shouldn’t interrupt her._ He turns to head back down, but the planks creak traitorously beneath his feet.

“Erik?” Isolda turns away from her apparatus to face him.

“The lights were all off. I was worried.”

Isolda nods. “I wanted to do some stargazing”, she says, with a slight edge in her voice. Is she angry with him for pointing that out? Before he can reply, Isolda gestures for him to come over and sit beside her. He lowers himself to the tiled floor, feeling the cool night wind billowing around them.

“You’re not angry with me, are you?” Erik asks. Even after all these years, she’s still an enigma.

She smiles and shakes her head. “It’s…no, it’s not you. I just have things on my mind.” Isolda begins to explain. She was in a long call with Jeanne, it seems, who’s been harried in her teaching job recently. Moving all the way to Asia for that hasn’t been easy either, of course. “I just feel bad, there’s nothing I can do to help her out.”

“Aren’t you being a big help, already?” Erik suggests.

She stares at him curiously.

“I mean, you’re giving her an outlet. That’s good enough. Not like you can fly over and take on her job.”

“I suppose”, she concedes with a slight frown. “What about you? How was your day?”

Now it’s Erik’s turn to pour out his struggles: office politics, accounting workloads, annoying co-workers. Isolda takes all this in wide-eyed. When he’s done ranting, she reaches for his hand and guides it to the side of her swollen belly. He hesitates; her touch sensitivity _was_ getting better, but the potent cocktail of pregnancy hormones seems to have reset that, at least temporarily.

“You sure?” he asks. Isolda nods.

“It’s fine, just for a while.”

Erik can’t help but notice how she stiffens slightly, then relaxes as he places his hand on her belly. He rubs it round in circles. Within, their son Johann kicks and tumbles about, making his presence felt. “He’s been active all day, so I thought I’d give him a headstart on stargazing” she explains, leaning her head on Erik’s shoulder.

“Well, seems he’s already taken after mum quite a bit.”

Isolda giggles softly. “Oh, don’t worry. I’m sure you’ll get to influence him more once he’s born.”

“Is that a good or bad thing?”

“Come on”, she says, lightly smacking Erik’s arm. “I chose you, didn’t I? Wouldn’t have done so otherwise.”

“That’s true.” How many years has it been since that day he met her in the woods outside Saint D’s? Erik can’t remember. _There she was_ , silent and observant amidst the canopy of trees, drawing him in with her pensive gaze. _And_ _the rest is history._

In the heat of the moment, with the three of them enveloped by the starry canvas, Erik allows himself to kiss her. They sink deeper into each other, an entangled ball of limbs and bodies bathed in starlight and exploring the cosmos within. When that’s done, Erik and Isolda lie side by side, watching the sky.

All the stars are accounted for, none missing.


End file.
